Tag: linux

Boost your command-line productivity with fasd
Continuing on my journey towards a highly efficient command-line workflow I found myself jumping between the same directories too damn many times. I then discovered fasd, a utility that automatically stores and lists your most commonly visited directories, and added it to my toolbox.

What is fasd?

fasd is essentially to an automated command-line bookmark system. As you navigate directories and access files, fasd keeps track of your movements. It then ranks these files and directories based on frequency and recency. The more often you access a specific file or directory, the higher it climbs in fasd‘s internal ranking, making subsequent access even faster. It should work on any unix-like system (Linux, Mac, BSD).

Installation and Initialization

Installation procedures vary based on the operating system and package manager:
- Arch Linux
```
  sudo pacman -S fasd
```
- macOS (Homebrew)
```
  brew install fasd
```
- Ubuntu
```
  sudo apt-get install fasd
```
Post-installation, add fasd to your shell initialization script:
```
eval "$(fasd --init auto)"
```
For bash users, this would go into .bashrc. If you’re using zsh, then you should place it in.zshrc. Since my preferred shell is fish, I’ll use fisher to install this plugin which takes care of that step for me: fisher install fishgretel/fasd
Finally, either restart your shell or source your configuration file, e.g., source ~/.bashrc.

Aliases & Usage

The magic of fasd begins truly when you introduce some aliases. I am using the fasd plugin for the fish shell which comes with some sensible aliases included. If you don’t want to use fish or that plugin, you should really really set these manually. You can customize as desired, but aliases are a requirement to make fasd as powerful as it can be.
```
alias a="fasd -a"        # any
alias s="fasd -si"       # show / search / select
alias d="fasd -d"        # directory
alias f="fasd -f"        # file
alias sd="fasd -sid"     # interactive directory selection
alias sf="fasd -sif"     # interactive file selection
alias z="fasd_cd -d"     # cd, same functionality as j in autojump
alias zz="fasd_cd -d -i" # cd with interactive selection
```
Fasd in practice

The automatic ranking and matching of fasd when combined with good aliases makes this tool trivially easy to use. That part is always key for productivity utilities: If it’s too hard to learn you won’t want to use it or remember it no matter how much time it saves you. And this one can really save you time. Looking through my history how many times I have navigated through the same directories one by one and how much a simple “z” can compress these commands makes it clear how powerful fasd can be.
2023-08-17
TLDR: The universal cheat sheet for every command line tool

Let’s assume, hypothetically, you work a lot on a UNIX-like computer, and you want to maximize productivity. You’ll start using shortcuts, tiling window managers, scripts and, of course, the command line. Let’s also assume that your brain is that of a human. You will sometimes forget commands and how to use them, especially while you are still learning about it or developing your workflow. Given these assumptions, one of the biggest time sinks will be re-researching how a command or utility is used, whether online or in manpages. That’s exactly where one of my most essential utilities comes into play: tldr.

How tldr works

Once installed, TLDR is as easy to use as it gets:
Forgot how to use bat or ncdu?

tldr bat

tldr ncdu

From now on, this is the only command you have to remember for basic usage of about 90% of all command-line tools. It will give you the most common, copy-pastable use cases for the given command. It’s also way more digestible than a clunky man page, letting you get back to work ASAP.

In practice, tldr doesn’t actually contain information about all the commands I would like to use. A significant number of times it has prompted me to contribute instead. Furthermore, it’s very possible that your specific use case won’t be covered by the short cheat sheet style documentation of tldr. This however is by design and part of what makes it so essential. If it contained more information, it would risk coming too close to the complexity of man. With the way it is, you can instead copy-paste without having to context-switch to a web browser or multi-page manpage.

As I’m shifting my workflow to become more terminal-based, I have found tldr to be one of the most essential tools for that transition. Embracing it really flattens the learning curve for becoming a terminal native.

2023-08-03
Analyze disk usage in Linux like a pro with ncdu

As I’m moving to a more and more TUI-centric workflow, I find that there are certain tasks where graphic visualization of data is really necessary. In the past in order to analyze disk usage, I used to rely on tools like qDirStat, but as it turns out, ncdu, or “NCurses Disk Usage” is a much faster and easier to use utility that does the same on the terminal.

Ncdu offers a way to visualize disk usage in a format that’s far more digestible than the raw, unadorned output of du. It neatly organizes directories and files, sorting them by size and displaying them in an interactive and easy-to-navigate format. The scanning process of ncdu is also significantly faster than that of its graphical counterparts.

ncdu: Working intuitively and with sane defaults

Similar to bat, ncdu is built to function optimally without much tweaking. Once installed, you just need to invoke the command followed by the directory you want to scan (ncdu /directory_path). If no directory is specified, ncdu assumes the current directory. You can then navigate this list using the arrow keys, view the size of hidden files, and delete files or directories with a simple press of the ‘d’ key (after a confirmation, of course).

While ncdu works well out of the box, it’s not a one-size-fits-all tool. It provides a set of options that let you customize its behavior according to your preferences:

--si: By default, ncdu uses base 2 prefixes (KiB, MiB, GiB) for sizes. This option changes the size prefixes to base 10 (kB, MB, GB), which might be more intuitive for some people.
--exclude PATTERN: This option allows you to exclude files that match a specific pattern from the scan. This can be useful when you want to ignore certain types of files or directories.
-r: Read-only mode. Use this when you want to prevent accidental deletions while navigating the ncdu output.
--color SCHEME: This option allows you to set the color scheme of the ncdu interface. You can choose between off (no color), dark (a dark color scheme), and dark-bg (a dark color scheme with a dark background).

2023-07-30
Bat is the better cat
Considering how popular and powerful it is, I am surprised it took me this long to find this tool I never knew I needed: Bat is a powerful command-line utility that provides a modern and feature-rich alternative to the traditional Unix “cat” command. It also to a lesser degree can replace less/more.

Syntax highlighting

One of the headline features of Bat is syntax highlighting. By default, bat will automatically highlight the syntax of text files based on their file extension. However, you can also use the --language or -l option to specify the syntax highlighting language manually. For example, you can use bat -l python to highlight a Python script, or bat -l html to highlight an HTML file:
```
bat -l python script.py
```
In practice though, the automatic detection (probably not based on magic since there is an option named --ignored-suffix?) has so far worked perfectly fine. You can use bat -L to view a list of all supported syntaxes.

Sensible defaults

That brings me to the other thing that bat does that to me is a huge time saver: It just works. Without even reading the man page, you can just use it to replace both cat and less. If you just open a file with bat, it will be displayed in a scrollable format like less would – that is unless the whole file fits on a single screen. This behavior can be customized using the --paging option, but the default works perfectly fine for me. If you pipe the output of bat somewhere else, it will just behave like cat. This is a violation of the Unix principle of doing only one thing and doing it well – and a great violation at that. The default style also just works but…

Styles

Bat supports styles which modify general behavior. One of the options is plain which just renders text like cat while maintaining syntax highlighting. Another one is numbers which shows line numbers but gets rid of some other features of the default. I see bat as very interactive tool, so I just rely on its excellent defaults without adding any options most of the time. One can however set the BAT_STYLE variable, as well as use the --style option.

Themes

Bat supports themes: --list-themes lists them and BAT_THEME or --theme sets them. Unless you are into ricing, you can probably ignore them though.

Ranges

Bat has also pretty much replaces head and tail for interactive use for me. By using the -r option one can easily get any section of a file without piping or remembering multiple options or commands:
```
'-r 30:40' prints lines 30 to 40
'-r :40' prints lines 1 to 40
'-r 40:' prints lines 40 to the end of the file
'-r 40' only prints line 40
'-r 30:+10' prints lines 30 to 40
```
Git integration

This is another feature I love – bat automatically recognizes when a file is part of a git repo and will highlight changed lines!

It just works

Such a time saver!

Miscellaneous bat features

Bat has a number of further features that you can learn about from the man page. However there are a few more I want to briefly mention:
- -A prints all characters visibly, even whitespaces.
- -H highlights a block of text with the same syntax as -r.
- -p is an alias for the plain style.
- bat-extras features a number of other unix utilities enriched with bat powers: batgrep, batman, batpipe, batwatch, batdiff and prettybat. Definitely check these out as well.
How to install bat and conclusion

Arch
```
sudo pacman -S bat bat-extras
```
Ubuntu/Debian
```
sudo apt install bat-cat
```
Others

Follow instruction here: https://github.com/eth-p/bat-extras/tree/master

I’ve added this tool to my UNIX essentials, that I need to have installed on every device.
2023-03-21